


Lackadaisy Optometry

by sovay



Category: Lackadaisy (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 14:54:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15342276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: You fell in love with him for the blood on his glasses.





	Lackadaisy Optometry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [handful_ofdust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handful_ofdust/gifts).



You fell in love with him for the blood on his glasses, you dumb ox, _golem_ , as he likes to call you, but the word that makes a golem is the truth and you have not seen much point in self-delusion these last ten years. Not his hands, neat-nailed and as quick on shirt-buttons as gun-butts, shaking out his cuffs after a firefight with that cool irritated efficiency that finds bloodstains more irksome than the corpses they came from, tightening his one extravagance of a college-crimson tie as another man might straighten himself out after a dissolute night. Not the sharp-winged, skeptical rake of his brows or the closemouthed curl that is the closest he allows himself to a smile, its preoccupation nearly a dare. Not the sleek dark flip of his hair under the fedora he replaces like the last word of an argument every time he leaves, though he combs it back even when nothing has ruffled him physically, fastidious as a grooming cat. Steel-rimmed lenses, the mist across them arterially bright, freckling a rain-shadow onto the pale eyes behind. In the trenches of Aisne-Marne and Meuse-Argonne, you saw men atomized by mortar fire and high explosives; you breathed them in with the damp of cordite and wet rot, wore them on your skin like sweat until they were indistinguishable from any other, less sentimental grime. You strip-washed in a whore's tin bath and knew someone else's death was dripping off you, never to come out if you scrubbed down to screaming bone. And still that New York bookkeeper's boy with his blood-spattered pince-nez looked at you with that mix of curiosity and exasperation, all impatient annoyance as if the world were some contradiction of debits and credits he should have been able to solve by now, as casually and exactly he had just put half a dozen bullets in the heads of strangers who had not even tried to kill him first, and what you felt more than anything as he blinked through those wire-rims was the desire to pull him close and lick them clean like a mother cat with her kittens, continue around to one slim, sticky cheekbone and down the sober planes of his cheek and open, finally, like a prayer from the life he mostly left behind, the tight line of his mouth, which could not be as bitter as it looked.

You watched, instead, as he took them off himself, wiped the lenses on a handkerchief snapped from his pocket with a little rictus of distaste and resettled them with the meticulousness of a spirit level or papers on a desk, while the former patrons of whichever little dive it was that time lay around the remains of their card game like so many pencil-shavings, incorrect figures rubbed out and forgotten. You were checking your own inventory, crowbar, shotgun, brass knuckles, the dull grind in the knee, the ache in the fingers, all the small, familiar injuries that reassured nothing greater had gone wrong. The hair-prickling warmth on your blind side was someone else's blood, not a head wound. You tasted just the corner of it, wondering suddenly if it was the same that your unusually silent partner had just polished away. And if he caught the other end of the thought, or if he only felt you staring—sixth, seventh, and eighth senses all built to pick up insult, the world getting in again—he glanced up then, clean-lensed, ruined handkerchief still in one hand, and you saw for the first time, unshielded, into the green of his eyes.

You do not name their color to him, even now, although you think it over to yourself now and then. Chlorine, if you are thinking of him as the war; if a liquor, chartreuse or absinthe, a cold-mouthed burn that warms and dizzies in the end. You do not tell him how much younger he looks when he takes the pince-nez off, although even as a child you imagine him scowling through glasses, flicking pages over with the same insistence to _know_. You do not liken him to anyone you knew in Prešporok or Camp Dodge, before the war or after, because no one else like him has ever crossed your life, full of strange characters and killers as it has been; you did not then. You gestured from the bodies on their bullet-splintered back room floor and said, "You got some . . . eh, _competition_ on you," and he flashed a narrow-eyed look as though trying to decide whether you were complimenting or mocking him. Folding up the handerchief in quick, wringing strokes, very dryly in that deadpan Eastern voice he never could drawl the vowels out of, "The _competition_ are the least of our sartorial concerns at this moment, I'm afraid," and the sudden traveling heat as his eyes raked you head to foot, characteristically critical, was as unsurprising as how nearly it made you smile. God made you a golem, America taught you to kill, and St. Louis set you to fall for a man with whom you have nothing in common but a knack for violence and a fatalist's sense of humor, so absurd it might be only an utter failure to make sense of the world. Rose-colored glasses, if the color of roses is blood. You never saw anything else when you looked at him.

If he fell in love with you, you never ask him why.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [handful_ofdust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handful_ofdust/), December 2012.


End file.
